


Horror Vacui : Amor Vacui

by Arya_Greenleaf



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Animal Death, Body Horror, Injury Recovery, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 15:37:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20677781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arya_Greenleaf/pseuds/Arya_Greenleaf
Summary: An encroaching unknown entity that is corrupting the Forces in Alderaan. It steals Light and Life, but does not foster Dark or Death, leaving a tangible Nothingness in its wake.Like his mother, Ben fosters the Light and Life in Alderaan. He is more powerful than he knows and comes to realize that there is far more complexity to the Natural Force than he has ever realized, and was too frightened to acknowledge.There will be a reckoning.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see end notes for potentially spoilery notes re: tags
> 
> This is a fic that I have been working on for the better part of this year over on twitter. It remains a work in progress but I wanted to put what I have out into the world (and by request from pals).

**WHERE**

  * _Alderaan : The World Above_

The dominion of Leia Organa and home of both humans and those who are attuned to the Natural Forces of Light, Life, Dark, and Death. Light and Life reign here, but there is a delicate Balance in a cycle that cannot be broken. Entropy seeks a host here.

  * _Birren : The World Between_

Neither Above of Below. An eternal realm that may be entered when one does not seek it out and may only be left behind by venturing Forward. Light and Dark have no dominion or power in Birren and Entropy cannot change it.

  * _Arkanis : The World Below_

The dominion of Hux and home of those no longer living. All those who die, human and those who are attuned to the Natural Forces alike depart Alderaan for Arkanis. Dark and Death reign here, but there is a delicate Balance in a cycle that cannot be broken. The Destroyer will bring Entropy here.

  * _The Tree Home_

An ancient, living tree that serves as ancestral home and hearth for the Organa family. It responds to their needs as if imbued with personality. The tree is deep in the forest and was once surrounded by a lush, overflowing garden.

**WHO**

  * _Leia Organa : Principal Spirit of Nature and Spring_

A powerful being who “rules” Alderaan and tends to the Balance, ensuring that Light and Life flourish, though not without Shadows. She nurtures the people who reside in Alderaan and all of the Flora and Fauna that flourish beside them. She does what must be and ensures Eternal Spring. Leia is the mother of Ben.

  * _Ben Organa : Fledgling Spirit of Nature and Spring_

Like his mother, he fosters the Light and Life in Alderaan. He is more powerful than he knows and comes to realize that there is far more complexity to the Natural Force than he has ever realized, and was too frightened to acknowledge.

  * _The Ren : The Fates_

Threefold being of neither Alderaan nor Arkanis: tethered to Birren. Of the Dark, but not of Dark intent. Enablers of Entropy and eager sponsors of the Destroyer. They seek to bring Fate about and to lift the veil that obscures the workings of the Balance of Natural Forces.

  * _Hux : Lord of the Underworld_

A powerful being who “rules” Arkanis and ensures that Dark and Death feed the delicate cycle of the World Above. Hux is the preserver of Order and Balance and seeks to contain the Destroyer, the Centerpoint of Entropy.

  * _The Void_

An encroaching unknown entity that is corrupting the Forces in Alderaan. It steals Light and Life, but does not foster Dark or Death, leaving a tangible Nothingness in its wake. The Void is known by the Ren but they do not serve it. The Void latches onto Ben and catalyzes the fast, dramatic changes that happen after his first encounter with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Animal Death:  
-Ben does a bit of necromancy on a lamb and because the lamb is "corrupt" in the Force, Leia kills it again and later destroys the bones in attempt to help Ben.  
-General description/discussion of the cycles of life and death, some descriptions of decay and decomposition.
> 
> Injury Recovery:  
-Ben is poisoned by what is essentially deadly nightshade in-world, he spends time recovering.
> 
> Snoke is present in a metaphoric sense only.
> 
> Additional warnings will be added as needed, a general theme of death and decay should be expected as well as some light body horror related to Ben's power and his interactions with nature.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Art by Hedge (Slide 1) inspired by a scene in this chapter](https://twitter.com/st_hedge/status/1136773505704484866?s=20)

Spring seemed eternal, disrupted only by those short months of sweltering heat just before the harvest. 

It was in that desperate, heavy heat that Ben felt most alive. He would lie on the ground in lush meadows of his mother's dominion and imagine himself melting. With his palms pressed to the earth, the sun-drenched heat of it soaking into his back and shoulders, he would first picture his flesh disappearing. It would nourish the earth beneath him and the tangle of wildflowers that would grow would be red -- velvet and garnet. The sun would bleach his bones bright white and dry them until they crumbled with the gentle kiss of the wind. As the air lifted the crumb of him and carried it away, his journey would be marked by white clover and bellbind. The little blooms would overtake everything in their path. 

Ben would live forever in the earth. 

The heat doesn't dissipate with the evening. It clings to everything -- the ground, the stone, the trees. Even the water in the stream is just warm to the touch, a whole arm swallowed by the flow before the coolness fights back. It's twilight when he feels his mother calling him back home. He has responsibilities to tend to, magic to work. 

At least, magic is what those people who don't have it call it -- the ones who whisper as he walks by in the market, who think that those like him are children of the gods -- a gift to the earth and to them, to be feared as much as loved. Ben knows better. There are no gods, only the universe and the Force that created it -- pure energy turned to matter, to air and earth and sea and flame. To flesh. 

Ben sits up and the fine blades of grass beneath him reach out, curling and grasping at the fabric of his tunic, unwilling to bid him and the energy that buzzes around him farewell. He shakes them gently off and takes leave of the places with silent promises to return with the sun. 

Ben meets no one on his short journey home to the house hidden in the canopy of the trees save for the caterpillar that drops onto his face when he moves the springy branches of a sapling out of his way. 

The root and branch of his home-hideaway reach out to help him climb, a twisting spiral staircase that disappears again when he has passed. The warm aroma of stewing flora envelops him when he finally reaches the landing and soft laughter rings out from the hearth deep within the dwelling. He comes upon the soft scene before the evening fire as the sky begins to truly blacken with the night, the passing of the wold before the sun and the moon a thing he feels deep in his bones without the need of windows. 

He's surprised to see Poe here so late in the day, so near to when Ben's own work must be done. 

"Here he is," Leia says with a smile on her face and in her voice. "Ben can accompany you back to town. I hate you send you through in the dark, time just got away from me." 

Poe shakes his head and assures her that whatever the issue is, it's not one. Ben can't help the kernel of irritation that blooms at the base of his skull -- unprivy to the conversation yet expected to play the part of chaperone and errand-boy. 

Poe smiles in his usual radiant manner and reaches into the pack on the floor beside his seat. "I stll have your lantern and no fear of the night." 

There is a wry rasp in his voice that makes Ben's teeth grind. Poe raises a small, round thing in his hand and gives it a little shake. It glows soft and warm, the pink-yellow-indigo swirl of magic just awoken lighting his face. 

"I'll have to delay bringing these around to where they belong until morning, though. No one will open their door beyond sunset in town. Not lately." 

Leia nods, a grave look on her face as she arranges colored glass bottles and tiny clay pots, seedlings just burst through the soil in each, into the stacked wooden compartments of the carry-all she send Poe away with every few days. "They can't be blamed," she says. "You all feel the darkness as much as we do, Ben and I. They just don't understand it." 

Poe leaves on a more somber note than Ben arrived to, making his careful way down the living stairs. Ben watches from the cradle of the balcony as his lantern light recedes through the trees in the dark brush. 

"Ben," Leia calls from inside. She's moved from the hearth, deeper into the house where others aren't invited. 

Ben feels ill at ease, like something far larger than troubling the darkness that has settled so lately into the fabric of things is waiting for him. He steps over the threshold into the private space where the most taxing of their work is done. The air is perfumed with the sharp smoke of the candles that light the space and the smoldering herbs gathered from the forest floor. 

"Something is wrong, Ben. We need to solve it -- reverse it somehow soon. I am afraid that it may take everything if we let it go... let it spread." 

The creature on the low table appears at peace, like it's only sleeping. Ben settles himself on the cushion on the floor and hesitates. The lamb's wool is impossibly soft when he touches it. There is no darkness that he can sense -- something more disturbing. A lack of anything at all. No light, no dark. No remnant of what life there once was, no last whisper of heart and breath. Ben can feel the rush as blood leaves his cheeks and his face turns cold and pale. 

"You feel it, then?"

"I don't feel _anything_."

"Precisely." Leia comes to sit beside him, curling her body around his as if Ben were still small enough for that. "This is beyond my abilities." 

It's not, Ben thinks. It's well within them, almost the entire point of them, if he were frank. To coax life back into the lifeless. To encourage all the various fruit and faun of the Earth to thrive. 

"I can't do this, mother."

"You can. You must."

"I -- "

"It's our duty Ben. We are bound to it."

Ben knows that this is far larger than a dead lamb or a sour field. It frightens him. There is something close and heavy, hovering. He puts his hands on the lamb with a measure of determination, his palms as warm as the silent creature is cool. 

Leia shifts and stands, stepping away from him. She leaves him alone with the lamb and the strange, too-present emptiness of it. The door shuts heavily and Ben is entirely alone. Ben closes his eyes and empties his chest. He breathes in, filling himself until it hurts and then out again until his head feels light. 

It's a strange thing, this power he has -- the Force that flows through him, that binds him to the earth and the stars. He's merely a conduit. 

In the stillness of the body under his hands he senses the depth of the emptiness there, the wide blank space where there was once something vibrant and alive. He reaches into it and the absence of the Force there grips him. Ben feels hot and cold. Blood rushes in his ears, roaring as loud as the heaviest summer storms. His flesh is clammy, sticky with rapidly cooling sweat. His jaw hurts, teeth squeaking against each other as he opens his mouth, levering the mandible out and down. The joint pops and it's electric in his skull. 

Ben runs his hands over the lamb and his vision fades. The warm candlelight turns a muddy grey as he carefully moves each limb, re-softened after hours of the young, spry muscles growing too tight.  Ben's heart bounds in his chest like it does when he runs as fast as his body will carry him. His stomach clenches and flops. 

Something grows inside of him, foreign and frightening, sitting heavy against his diaphragm and taking up all the space his guts are meant to occupy. Whatever it is crawls outward, wraps itself like wet vines around his ribs and spine. It writhes under his skin, mirrors the network of his veins until he can't tell the difference between the pulse of the thing that has bloomed within and his own heartbeat. 

There is a noise, a buzz -- a ring -- a scream? 

Ben's jaw aches, mouth open wide as the sound escapes him and then... there is warmth beneath his palms, his fingertips. Life, in the weakest thrum. The lamb bleats pathetically, trying to catch its breath. 

Suddenly, Ben can see again. It is as if color has exploded across the landscape of the room, as if he can see the vibrant, teeming, bright life-force of the tree that supports his home -- in the very walls -- in the forest beyond and the meadows beyond _that_ and the town _and_... 

Ben wants to move away from the lamb and strange emptiness that won't seem to let go of it. 

He can't. 

His body is locked, muscles tense and joints frozen there with his hands cradling the wretched lamb and his head thrown back and his mouth wide. 

He feels as though he is looking back at himself from outside of his aching body. He knows that his countenance is somehow changed, that the warm candlelight isn't just a reflection on the wet, glassy surface of his eyes. 

Ben pushes himself away from the lamb, away from the table. It is not without great effort. He rises and stumbles, half crawling to the sideboard and the wide basin set into the top. His throat is aflame but none of the cool, sweet water that he shovels into his mouth grants him relief. Laughing in his own broken way over the sound of the lamb's bleating, he plunges his face wholly into the basin with open eyes. He comes up gasping, feeling like a candle someone has licked their fingers to extinguish. Hair dripping and water clinging to his long lashes,

Ben peers at himself in the trembling surface. He _is_ changed somehow that he cannot quite put his finger upon but his eyes... his eyes are frightening. He recoils at first and then peers again, cautiously. His reflection looks like something from a story meant to terrify children with whites gone dark and the earthy amber-brown aglow. He squeezes them shut, gripping the edge of the sideboard tight. 

The lamb has refused to calm itself, gaining strength with each plaintive whine. 

"Ben?" Leia calls softly from the other side of the door. "Are you alright?"

Ben sinks to the floor, eyes squeezed shut and his hands clamped over his hears. He throws all of his stringy, fleeting concentration at the lamb, willing it fruitlessly to quiet. 

"Let me in, Ben," Leia calls again. Suddenly, she's kneeling in front of Ben, touching his hands and trying to get him to look at her. "What happened? What did you see?"

"Nothing," he insists. "_Nothing_." Ben barks a laugh and twists his body away from his mother's concerned smothering. If there was nothing and he could define it then certainly there had to be _something_? 

Leia takes his face in her hands in a way that brokers no refusal. "Ben."

"It's alive, I've done what I was tasked with. _Please_."

"Look at me. You've been in here for hours, please, Ben."

He opens his eyes and Leia recoils, confusion and fear twisting her expression. "Ben," she chokes, half a sob. "What's happened?" 

He pulls away, crawling a pace and pulling himself up off the floor. "I don't know. There's... there's something. It's something. I don't know. Just, please -- please -- make it be _quiet_!"

He doesn't pull away from her hand at his. "It's okay, it's quiet." 

It is. He knows its a trick, a bit of a glamour, but it's enough to get him on his feet. The lamb is trying to stand, its lungs powerful but its legs still unsure. 

"I have to get out of here," Ben says, a little feverish. 

"Go, rest. I'll handle it from here." 

Leia doesn't follow Ben out the door. She gives him space to move, though her presence is heavy. Ben flees the room and into the cool night air on the balcony. He climbs, slender branches reaching to support him. Thicker, springy limbs are twisted into narrow walk. It's solid beneath his feet. 

Real. 

Secure. 

He stumbles onto the landing high in the canopy. His bedroom is still and silent. The warmth of the sun hasn't quite dissipated, even at this late hour. 

Ben's skin itches, electric and crawling. His clothes are too rough and too soft and too hot and not warm enough. He yanks them off and crawls into bed, shivering. He feels... dead. _And_ alive. Filled with so much emptiness -- filled with so much of the strange thing that has taken root between his lungs and in his veins. 

He won't sleep, he knows this. Curled into the nest bedding, he lifts his fingers in welcome. The lush viney thing that clings to his walls reaches out, a tiny shoot creeping and curling around his fingertips. 

* * *

Leia closes her eyes and waits. 

She feels Ben move through their home, feels the hum of it responding to him, feels him finally settle. She's worried for her son. She'd thought he'd be safe, protected somehow by his youth and vitality -- by his kindness and strong heart, his soft manner with the life that they cultivate around them. 

It seems instead that maybe... maybe those things put him at risk.

She doesn't understand what's happened and it frightens her. 

Leia gathers the lamb into her arms, cradles it close to her chest where it might feel the beat of her heart. It calms, bleats still stretching over several moments. She thinks of Ben as she waits. 

He seemed to glow, like he'd swallowed the moon outside the window -- like he'd bathed in the sacred springs she once visited and emerged lush -- and his eyes, they confused her. His eyes so dark, irises so hot -- like a torch in the velvet shadows deep underground. 

She can't press him, not while he is so frantic and frightened himself. She can feel that too, the racing of his heart tied by an invisible thread to hers. 

Leia strokes the lamb in her arms. It's breathing. Life has filled it like teeming insects in hive. The lamb is cool now, not warm with the promise of life to come. It's heart is strange and slow, each beat is long suspension. She looks deeper and senses only void. She feels like she is being pulled into it, like the vacuum the stars are hung in is somehow contained in this small, unassuming creature. 

"Shh," she coos as the lamb bleats softly and snuggles closer in her arms. She shifts its weight to one arm, laying her cheek against the baby-soft head on her shoulder. With a smart flick of her fingers, the brilliant blue stone of her ring shifts back, a clever device on a spring.

"Shh," Leia coos. 

She doesn't know if she is trying to comfort the lamb or herself. There's no darkness here, nothing _bad_. But, everything is _wrong_ in a way that cannot be allowed to be. This strange emptiness, this weird imitation of light and life and vitality. 

Leia thinks of  Ben and hopes that sleep, _exhaustion_, has taken him. 

When she presses the fine, sharp tip of the little blade to the lamb's throat it hardly struggles. 

"Shh," she soothes, its heartbeat and hers quickening with the imminent thing hanging in the air between them.  She presses harder and the blade meets little resistance in the tender, young throat. 

The wound is not large, that's unnecessary. Dark, red-black blood runs over her fingers and lands in delicate droplets across the sturdy table -- across her cheeks. It's lukewarm and eerie with none of the heat of vitality. 

She holds the lamb while it struggles gently and grows limp in her arms just as it was before. She places it down as peacefully as she can manage and swipes the heel of her palm across her brow, careful not to cut herself. 

The room is quiet again, the hum of the  Force that feeds her power -- Ben's power -- the low vibration of light and life -- begins to creep back into the room, to fill the emptiness the lamb and its strange death brought into her home. 

When Leia looks at her reflection in the basin of water at the sideboard, she can hardly see herself for the pink murk.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Art by Hedge (Slide 2) inspired by a scene in this chapter](https://twitter.com/st_hedge/status/1136773505704484866?s=20)

Ben knows that he's slept because the early morning sun, still peachy-pink and golden and low in the sky, wakes him. It's not been a restful slumber. He cannot remember if he dreamt. It may be for the best.

Ben opens his eyes, heavy and hot with his turmoil, and stares unseeingly at the high ceiling. Something is different and he cannot put into a coherent thought precisely what it is. He feels too warm and too cold. Static pin-pricks dance between his skin and the bedding.

For a moment he forgets what he's done, what he saw in his reflection. He shivers remembering. Fear fills him, he does not want to see himself.

There is something different about the room. The hum of life from the tree that cradles their home is stronger, more insistent. It is multilayered like a fine chorus of voices -- base, alto, mezzo, soprano -- all swelling around a sustained chord.

There is too much green. Too much pink and white and blue and yellow and purple. Ben focuses on the ceiling. It is covered in thick, woody vines so much deeper than it should. Ben imagines if he touched it he might lose his arm to the elbow. He sits up carefully, his head spinning.

The walls -- the floor. Covered.

Heavy, fragrant blooms and vibrant fruit hang from the cordons. It's an assault on his senses.

He swings his feet over the edge of the bed to find that the shoots have crept up toward him, reaching like fingers. He places his feet on the floor, or what he can make of it, and overripe fruit crushes beneath his weight. The sickening scent wafts up to his nose on the soft morning breeze.

Ben dresses quickly, layering clothes as if they might armor him from the encroaching flora. He picks quickly and carefully along the path from his private space and the home-tree hurries to guide him toward the ground. He realizes as his toes crinkle long-dried leaves beneath his skirts that he has forgotten his shoes.

He does not care.

He runs.

Ben runs without direction. He feels as though the yawning maw of Nothingness and Emptiness is hurtling toward him, hanging ever wider. He pushes himself. The throaty, velvet song of a mourning dove -- his mother's familiar, her little watchers -- pierces through the white noise in his head. He stumbles, feet ravaged by brush and bramble, skirts catching -- being caught by the hungry hands of the flora around him.

He pushes, running until he simply cannot.

The gentle roar of water and the crisp, clean scent of it floods his senses. Panting, chest burning, he stops. Ben has roamed the wood and the town and the fields beyond like a feral thing from the first moment he could escape from behind his mother's skirts. He has never been here. The water falling from the rock, the stream, the lush grass, the young trees that surround the place might have sprung up with the sunrise, new and strange.

Ben turns around on the spot, studying this new place warily. The very earth beneath his feet feels different. Is it the earth? Or is it Ben?

He turns and loses his path, the trees lost for the forest. Other than the sound of the water this place is silent. He tracks the line of the stream, the flow of the water. It surges gently toward the wood but Ben can't recall the sound of it as he ran -- can't recall water in the eastern edge of his mother's dominion at all.

He can no longer hear the dove calling.

Sweat has beaded in his hair and drips in a stinging, salty mess over his brow. He blinks, clearing his eyes. A fat drop rolls over the bridge of his nose and falls from the tip. It catches on the unruly grass beneath his feet, clinging heavily on the sharp tip of a blade and weighing it down. It finally falls, its gravity greater than the strength of the blade, and disappears into the rich, dark earth.

Ben wipes his face with his sleeve. In the silence here, the vacuum-like absence of the Force that has born down on him seems held at bay. He can feel it, vague and lurking just past the treeline, but it does not advance.

Ben lifts his foot, stepping further into the clearing, and gasps. He is held, _grasped_. He lifts the hem of his skirts. The glossy blades of grass and frothy, weedy flowers reach out, twisting around his toes and crawling along the top of his feet. He pulls and feels the palpable dismay that trembles in the web that binds him to flora and fauna and the aether between.

He pulls and frees himself. He cannot run back toward the void. He cannot run home.

He walks with tired, heavy legs toward the water. Ben sits at the edge with some effort, just far enough from the little falls that the spray of it dances over his face gently. The earth at the edge of the stream is soft with it. He sinks just slightly in it and the wetness of it quickly soaks into his skirts and the garments beneath, even through his many layers. The water reaches for his skin just as everything else in this world is wont to. His knees pop as he settles down. His spine throbs, each vertebra a beacon of hurt. His feet feel aflame now that he is off of them, the pressure of his mass distracting his brain and quieting the impact of their ruin.

Ben shifts his hems up toward his knees. His feet are dirty and abraded. He brings a sole for closer inspection and winces at the sharp pain of things he can finally see. He prods and squeezes the tender pad, catching a thin sting with his nails.

The stream is cold. It's painful to dip his feet into it, so sore as they are, until the flow and the chill numbs them where they hang from the short, steep bank. Groaning, he leans back, resting first on his elbows and then laying his aching back against the ground, still clinging to the coolness of night even as the sun takes its place. Ben strokes his fingers through the grass and stares up at the bright, whitewashed sky until it hurts his eyes to keep looking.

He has not dared to look at himself, carefully avoiding his reflection. He doesn't need to _see_. He _knows_. 

He wonders how he might reverse the ill effects of his work, of that terrible nothingness chewing at him from the inside. He wonders if it's possible at all? 

He thinks of the lamb, threading his fingers close to the roots of the thick, weedy grass. If he's given it life, given of himself, taken the emptiness it held into himself... could he take it back -- give it back? Pour this out of himself and into its proper vessel? 

As if conscious of his dismay the grass shifts. It twines around his fingers and wrists and strokes gently beneath the close sleeves of his inner garments. It tickles through his hair and curls around the shells of his ears where he is pillowed in the thick growth. Ben shivers and wiggles his numb toes in the water. The lazy heat of the morning is building. There's a storm in the air, in spite of the brilliant sky. He can smell it, taste the humidity in the atmosphere on his tongue. His clothes are heavy with it, the salty sting of the sweat beneath all too present. 

He can hardly breathe. A tendril of some unknown flora curls teasingly at his throat like the earth beneath him knows the secret answer to a question he hasn't asked. Ben is suffocating in his layers. He cannot remember why he deemed them necessary. He loosens the knot of his belt to almost immediate relief. The warm breeze makes the folds of his shirt flutter. Ben imagines that he might shed the layers of cloth and then slip out of his skin, free of terrestrial bindings. He would float away on that breeze, carried far from the ugly thing that is waiting for him just outside of this little oasis. 

The grass tickles and Ben sits up, annoyed. Invasive, the lot of it. Not a single blade has _ever_ minded itself. Always _grabbing_ at him, forever taking over every bit of land it touches. 

The oppressive humidity builds in mere moments. With a huff, Ben opens his shirt, plucking and fanning the fabric in an effort to cool himself. He lays back again, the effort futile. The numbness of his feet begins to creep up into his calves. It makes his stomach turn, thinking of how he might stumble and fall if something comes, if something needs evasion. 

There is movement all around, soft and subtle. The grass shifts in the breeze. Leaves and needles rustle in the canopy. Creeping ivy and blue crown vines sneak along the ground as if they might fool him if they are quiet. The flora _begs_ for contact, a plea that shimmers in the air and the forces between Ben and the earth. He sighs and relaxes. A spiny cobalt bloom bursts near his temple, the sweet smell draping itself across his face. 

Greenery leans in, touches him, lays itself against his bare skin. It seeks him out the same way it leans into the sun above the surface of the earth and grows toward the water below. Blades of grass and reedy little weeds stroke his hands and sides. Vine curls over his belly, orange trumpets unfurling against his sternum. The fabric of his shirt is heavy with the flora, falling away at his sides. The light, airy inner garments he wears suffer assault, tendrils of ivy seeking the warmth and salt of his bare skin. 

"Enough now," he breathes. The flora settles like a scolded child, huddled close for comfort even after. Supple shoots curl over his shoulder. They sneak along the the line of his throat and encroach about his chin and ears. "I said stop that," Ben croaks. The sun has dried him up, made a husk of him. "Wretched things."

The flora is reluctant to let him go when he pulls away. It clings to him, sticking to his clothes. 

"You've ruined it. I would have stayed but you won't behave." He speaks gently, moving the heavy growth from his shoulder and lowering it to the ground. He winces with mild shame, blades of grass snapping when he lifts his hands. He abandons his shirt to the flora, hydrangea curled into the residual warmth of his body like a cat. 

There on his knees, Ben dips his fingers into the stream. He looks back at the treeline and the heavy Emptiness. It's there, waiting. He hazards a glance at the water -- at himself. He is overwhelmed, brought to tears with relief. His eyes, though dark and strange, no longer burn with that frightening flame. 

Belt dragging, he stands and unfastens the heavy skirts from his waist. He tentatively steps into the stream and wades carefully toward the gentle falls.

* * *

Leia feels him wake, senses that he's confused and frightened. 

Ben leaves. 

She tries to follow but she isn't as young and spry as she once was. It's alright, she thinks. The earth will hold him, protect him. It will tell her if something is wrong, if he is in danger. 

The mourning doves that nest just outside her window coo with interest, with a desire to be useful. Ever her faithful messengers, her watchers, they take flight and follow. 

Leia sits in the room where this terrible thing was welcomed, just as she had all night. The blood has dried, coppery and sharp on her cheeks and her clothes. The pattern looks nearly purposeful. It itches against her skin and she scratches. 

It flakes away. 

The lamb lies on the table, as peaceful as it looked at the start save for the brown stains on its fine wool. This thing shouldn't be given to the earth. The unnatural emptiness persists, refusing to leave even through Leia's most earnest attempts to push it away, push it out of her home. 

She needs sleep. 

Rest will help her think, help her decide how to deal with this abomination. She seals the door behind herself when when she steps over the threshold, thick green shoots slithering through the mechanisms of the hinge and handle. She pauses on her way to bed, something uneasy drawing her to Ben's room. She pivots, light on her feet across the little pathway of their canopy-sanctum, and lets herself inside. 

She steps back at the sight, the state of the simple chamber shocking. Its like a vineyard left unattended for decades. The vines are thick and trunk-like, obscuring the walls and ceiling and floor entirely. Younger shoots curl wildly every which way. Fruit lies and hangs, heavy and half-fermented. Flowers droop, nearly gone to seed. The whole lot of it has such a strong aroma -- _a stench_. 

Sweet rot in the hottest days of the summer. 

Leia feels drained as she stands in the threshold, energy sapped as in sultry days in the sun -- replaced by a cold stone in her gut. Tentatively, she touches the strange growth. It splinters and crumbles in her hand, dry and not dead, but lifeless. She steps away, hand pressed to her chest. 

"Oh, Ben."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Art by ydnsm, inspired by this story -- which inspired a scene in this chapter](https://twitter.com/ydnsm1/status/1132856365485940736?s=20)

Ben steps out of the water, gossamer fabric clinging. The flora has calmed, content to huddle with the haphazard pile of his shed outer clothing. The orange trumpets have taken refuge from the creeping hydrangea in the bulk of his skirts. 

He feels refreshed, unbothered even as the minnows cluster closer to his calves and ankles. Delicate, frilly petaled violets spring up in his footprints and give him soft landing when he settles on the ground again. He drifts, lazy in the sun and the heat. He does not realize how deeply he has slept until the shrill shrill scream of the cicadas in the trees wakes him and he sees how far the sun has moved across the sky. He's dried off save for the thick mess of his hair, a perpetual problem. 

He stretches and turns and watches the shadowy treeline, feeling watchful eyes on him somewhere unseen. Ben slows his movement, his breathing. He peers into the deep dark between the dapples of light through the canopy. He reaches out with that strange Force, feeling himself as if racing across each blade of grass and into the brush beyond and up into the branches where the best vantage might be offered. 

There are people, he thinks. It doesn't feel like any fauna he knows. They're watching him -- have been watching him -- from just beyond the thin veil of whatever is holding the awful nothingness at bay. 

"Who's there?" he demands. 

He stays where he is, a show of confidence, quiet power. The shadows shift. Leaves rustle. Whoever it is moves forward. 

"We are," they say in a voice that is at once plural and singular, like the cicadas. They materialize like a heat mirage. 

"Who are you?" Ben asks. 

He shifts upright and onto his feet, prepared to move. They're strange looking. Dressed in supple, dark dyed hide and woven vine and grass and husky twine. They are barefoot, features half obscured with conjured shadow. They are not _just_ people. They're like Ben -- but not. The air tastes astringent with emptiness and something else distinctly dark. It's alluring and frightening. One of them takes a breath, air hissing through their teeth. 

"There's so much Light here," they say nonchalantly. "It was hard to tell. But close up..." They step closer and Ben lifts his chin defiantly. The hydrangea writhes. Orange trumpets perk. Grass rustles. 

"Who are you?" Ben demands again. 

They shrug, glancing at each other. "No one. Everyone. You. Us."

"I'm not in the mood for riddles. Speak plainly." The volume of the falls seems to mellow, the gentle rush of the stream quiet and sluggish. "Or be gone." 

The little cohort exchanges something silently among themselves. "We are the Ren," they answer in that same plural-singular. 

"And what are the Ren?" 

They shrug without moving. "You called us here. You must know." 

Ben insists that he does not. "Leave now or you will find yourselves at the mercy of the Lady of this dominion." 

They laugh and Ben sweats cold. A cloud passes across the sun for the first time all day. "Leia Organa has no power here. This is not Alderaan."

"You lie."

"We do not. It is not in our nature to deceive."

Ben snorts, "Well then, I must have wandered unwitting into Arkanis. Where is the Lord of the Dead to bid my quick departure -- or imprisonment?"

They laugh again and if Ben were a child he might be petrified. He is suddenly all too conscious of his little-clothed state. He feels bared before these strange pests, but not only in the literal sense. 

"Foolish child, this is not Alderaan nor Arkanis. This is neither, the in-between. You are in Birren, ruled by both and none. Collection place of the lost." 

Ben shakes his head and steps away, toward the tree line. "You will make yourself scarce," he orders. 

The canopy trembles. Ben steps on swift feet through the trees, plunging headlong into the disturbing void. His breath nearly knocked from his chest, he supports himself from tree to tree, the bark rough under his palms and fingertips. He stumbles and finds himself in a sunny patch of clear ground and -- a modest fall of water, a stream, his discarded clothing on the ground, the flowering vines thick and urgent in their countenance. The ones who called themselves the Ren stand where he left them. 

"You cannot go back, Ben Organa. Only forward. You cannot leave this place by retreat."

Panic rises in his gut. The fall of water pounds harder and louder and faster. Ben pushes past the Ren and they disappear as if made of mist when he shoves the shoulder of the closest. Laughter rings out through the little clearing and the trees tremble. He plunges his feet back into the freezing stream and lifts them step by stumbling step through the new strength of the current. The waterfall pounds like so many hammers against his head and shoulders as he hurtles through it. 

All at once it is quiet. 

The fall is behind him, water still spraying against his back, but it doesn't make a sound. The pool of water there in the cave is glassy and placid. It casts aqua and green reflections against the bright white lime. He doesn't know how deep the water is but it is freezing as he walks forward, making the calm surface ripple wildly. He is relieved that the water only reaches his waist, his feet firmly on the miraculously soft and sandy lake bed. He shivers, body seized by the cold. 

The light disappears, swallowed by distance until he must cautiously feel his way forward -- with his hands and feet and careful ears, the thrum of the earth and all its treasures disconcertingly absent. He reaches a wall and panics, feeling his way across first one direction then the other. Tears of relief sting his eyes when he feels crawling, woody, springy stems under his palms and solid ledge when he plunges his hands through the growth. 

Sticky, wet berries burst under his forearms when he pulls himself upward and then his knees and shins and feet as he crawls toward the weak, grey light that he can just barely make out up ahead. The scent is familiar and overwhelming but Ben cannot quite place it. His heart races and he begins to sweat. The weak light that he follows grows increasingly sharp. He squints, eyes tired and hurting as if he's been staring at the sun. Ben crawls and stumbles and finally the light fills the cave. 

Ben looks down at his hands -- arms and legs and belly stained too -- covered in deep purple muck, gritty with dirt. Realization dawns as he moves, dragging his bare feet and begging his body to continue. The lush foliage covers the cave, papering the walls and carpeting the floor and hanging in a curtain across the mouth that he is desperate to reach.  The bright purple flowers are cheerful and inviting, the dark berries tempting and promising indulgent sweetness.

***

When Ben was a child, a time that feels eons past, he tromped through his mother's gardens. He was most at home, most himself, among the cacophony of blooming color and texture and teeming life -- the plants, the insects, the birds amphibians and reptiles and vulnerable little mammals who took refuge there felt so much a part of Ben and he of them. 

In the gardens he tested himself, pushed his power and the limits of his abilities. He can clearly remember each painstakingly cultivated section as it was. The things prized merely for their pleasant presence, those valued for medicinal use, others for their tenderness and taste. Flowers and vegetables and fruit and leaves in every shape and shade of green. He had been hidden away in a little oasis of purple and blue, coaxing each of the seventeen types of violets there to grow in every way he could imagine. Taller, greener, more vibrant, fatter blooms with more velvety petals! Ben laughed as the short plants grew as thick as bushes under his power, reaching his nose and then soaring over his head like the huge sunflowers at the edge of the wood where his mother had built his fairy home. 

What child ever came without question when called? Ben had been no different, dashing through the rows away from the musical jingle of Leia's laugh as she searched for him. He halted, dirty feet disturbing a wild cloud of dust at the edge of the section he was forbidden entry. The things that grew there were dangerous, his mother insisted. He sometimes doubted it. How could flora so beautiful be dangerous? The foreboding feeling that rustled along with their dark green leaves dictated caution, though, so he obeyed. The flora, however, as if having seen something they wanted -- like a relentless kitten in the kitchen -- would not leave him be. 

It was weeks later that they would have him, that all their leaning and curling and blooming would no longer be in vain. Ben cannot remember what had been wrong, why he had sat so sulkily in the patch of flowering squash. He does remember the vindictive thing that clawed his chest as he pressed his palms around the smallest of the fruit, willing it to grow. It did. It grew too heavy, pulling the vine that gave it life toward the earth. It grew until its skin split and the bright orange flowers on the vines shriveled and browned. The squash grew soft and mealy, the smell of rot making Ben ill. It spread along the twisted, heavy network of vines until the lush bed was brown and black with death, squash already attracting flies in the high heat of the summer. 

He ran then, afraid of what he had done -- astonished. Leia did not make dead things, did not drive decay and ugliness -- neither did Ben. He trampled flowers and food carelessly as he went, pulled forward by something strong and unseen. He did not halt before the forbidden section of the gardens this time and tumbled in, instead. Immediately, he swooned with the sent of sweet, ripe fruit and the perfume of the ferocious blooms. Softly, as if he might disturb some great slumbering beast, he moved through the neat rows of beds and trellises heavy with life. He marveled at it all, the ruined bed of squash forgotten for the moment. 

Ben would later learn that the plant was called Atropa, but all he knew as he pressed his nose into the cheery purple flowers and squished the red-bue-black berries between his fingers, was wonderment. Thick clusters of berries hung over his head, the main stalks of the plants as tall as Ben's father. He plucked at them, hands sticky with juice and crushed flesh. His heart jumped and he rolled a plump berry across his tongue before he crushes it with his teeth. It was the sweetest thing he'd ever tasted, delicious and inviting and begging of another morsel. 

He began to sweat as he plucked the largest, shiniest berries and pressed them between his lips. Ben remembers the terrifying, piercing sound of his mother's scream when she came upon him with his purple-stained mouth and fingers. The memory of her scooping him up in her arms, struggling even as she was under his weight against her petite frame, was like a dream. It was hazy and floating and blurred by the violent pound of his heart in his ears and the painful churning of his gut. 

For days he was ill after the first forced dose of bitter, soapy oil and the sickness that followed. 

The only _solid_ memory Ben retains is the heat and sweating of fever and the harshness of even the soft light in his bedroom with the curtains closed flush. When he was well enough to hazard a totter to the window, the scent of springy, smoldering green was heavy in the air. 

***

Ben wants to go back, to dive back into the still water in the cave, to swim in the shockingly cold tumble of the stream. He knows without knowing that turning back won't bring him back to the clearing. 

He has never hoped so earnestly to hear the distinctive coo of the mourning doves that are his mother's eyes to the world. 

Cheek pressed to the dusty, dry earth, he lets out a wheezy laugh. He'd even be thankful for Poe to happen upon him. He'd gratefully suffer the indignity of being hauled up and bumped through the wood on Poe's cart. 

Ben hefts himself off the ground and onto his knees. Overripe, half-rotten berries burst under his palms and shins. His heart hammers against his ribs and his lungs refuse to fill in more than short bursts. Against the nearest tree unchoked with Atropa, he struggles to his feet. 

"Please, no," he croaks, "not now. I can't --" 

The wisteria climbing up the trunk shakes and slithers, the delicate vine circles his wrist and creeps up his forearm. He yanks and the sharp pain of the snap lances through him. The vine that still clings to the trunk withers as if in shame -- that on his arm twists tighter. 

Ben picks his way slowly toward home. The wood looks so unfamiliar, he has to trust his feet and the feel of the earth beneath them. He drags himself from tree to tree, stumbling and half-crawling as he goes. The wisteria twists and climbs. It pulls at his skin and twines through his hair. 

"Please, don't," he whispers, the end of the vine shifting toward his face and grabbing at his brow. "Please." 

He's so close. He feels it, knows it. Somewhere in the canopy, doves call out in urgency. He cannot keep his feet. He falls, hissing in pain with the impact as it shoots from wrist to elbow to shoulder and spine. The detritus of the forest floor is not kind. His hands are sore, feet and shins abraded. His desperate shamble has not helped to slow the Atropa's deadly dance through his system, leeched through his overheated skin. The sky or his vision turns grey and he cannot continue. 

There on the ground, sticky with poison and swaddled in angry wisteria, he succumbs.


	5. Chapter 5

Leia finds her son on the ground, just beyond the tree-cleared land around their home. She's searched for him for days, unable to even feel the thrum of his particular vitality within the greater cacophony of the natural world.

The birds, her watchers and familiars, have failed to find him, too, as clever as they are it is for naught.

It's as if he has simply stopped existing -- as if he never had at all -- and then suddenly Ben's presence comes hurtling back into the world in an unbroken scream.

When she find him, the flora have claimed him. The wild grasses, the weedy white flowers, the choking wisteria -- they twine around his body in a desperate jumble. With a brush of her fingers the grass and the weeds recoil, scolded efficiently. The vine refuses to subside, wrapped _so tightly_ it might be a part of him.

"Ben," she calls softly, trying her best to keep her composure.

On her knees beside him she uncovers his face. His glassy eyes are unseeing, his lips pale. His skin is flushed and splotchy, clammy to the touch.

She cannot waste time. Her doves mumble their agitation from the boughs above.

His breath is shallow, chest and back hardly even moving with the expansion of his lungs. She jams her fingers between the stubborn wisteria vines and presses them beneath his chin. His heartbeat is faint.

A family in town might begin preparing for a funeral, moving somberly around the home and readying a place in the forest to accept their dear one's body.

Leia prepares for a fight.

The wisteria will not subside. It twists harder, firmer, more desperately with each tug. Her secret blade is somehow not strong or sharp enough to cut through it. She pushes Ben onto his back, vine and grass snapping as she forces him up and over. Sweating, grunting and growling, she manages free an arm. She pulls him bodily -- stumbling and falling, her clothing snagging and tearing about the hems, her hands slipping.

Beneath the vine and dirt Ben's skin is sticky with something. She thinks of how wide his pupils are in that blank, glassy stare and pulls harder, shouting through the effort. She is breathless as they break the line of flora and spill onto the clear ground around their home.

Exhausted, eyes stinging with sweat and tears she refuses to shed, she pulls him and drops to the ground in her effort. The earth shakes gently, just a shy tremble at first. The roots of their home-tree shift and a fine network lifts from the ground beneath Ben. The snapping of the tiny roots is audible as they break the surface. Dirt and dry leaves rain down as the delicate net wraps around him and rises. The huge anchoring roots shift and bend to accept such precious cargo.

"Thank you," she whispers, voice trapped in her throat. It is easier to heft Ben up the stairs then, grasping the woven net of living root. Their home feels her urgency, conveying them from stair to stair so fast she feels she might be floating.

Leia drags him through their space before the hearth and into the room where they perform their sacred, secret works.

The lamb's skull mocks her from the shelf.

She cannot shift him onto the table, even as low as it is. Her strength is gone. With a good blade, she cuts away the careful root bundle. The wisteria fights. She is shaking as she works, terrified to do inadvertent harm. She gets her fingers beneath a vine at his throat, his pale flesh so abused. Steadying her hands she slips the blade against the stalk.

She squawks with joy when it breaks only to feel the drop of her stomach in dismay when fresh, young shoots begin immediately to grow -- springy and bright against broken vessels beneath his skin.

Leia speaks softly to her son, slowly to keep the tremble from her voice. "Ben I don't know what to do."

He is unresponsive, his shallow breathing even less obvious now.

"I don't think that herbicide will be effective. You're too overgrown." She laughs bitterly at her own ineffectiveness. "Lye will only burn you."

The tears that finally fall are hot on her cheeks. She wishes she could raze the forest, destroy every vine and tree and flower. The wisteria begins to bloom. Heavy purple and pink bundles bud and unfold across his chest. They hide his lovely, dark hair. Obscure his unseeing stare.

Suddenly, the solution is clear. Leia lays her hands against Ben's chest, slipping them beneath the thick bushels of blossoms. She closes her eyes and commands them to _grow_.

Nothing in this world lasts. Nothing persists indefinitely. Even the oldest trees, hundreds or thousands of years -- undateable like their home -- cannot. _Do not_. Every living thing must age, must mature, must eventually die.

Her head fills with the scent of the wisteria. It smells of summer -- the height of the season and the brightest, hottest sun -- the heaviest rain and most dangerous floods. The flowers bloom uncontrollably. The stalk thickens, fibrous and strong.

And then... there is the sharp stench of _rot_. Of flowers grown too much and too big. The wet aroma of decay.

The flowers go soft and brown, the decomposing petals falling and turning to mush. The vines turn dry and brittle. Leia pulls and the thick stalk in her hands breaks away. No new shoots form from the raw ends. Desperately she tears at the dead wisteria until it is reduced to a splintered pile around them.

"Ben!" She shouts. "Ben you need to wake up!"

The tacky substance on his arms flakes as she shakes him. She smells the stuff, swipes it on her fingers against her tongue in haste.

"Oh no, Ben, what have you done?"

She overturns the the contents of shelves and cabinets in wild abandon, searching for the antidote to the Atropa's deadly effect.

* * *

Ben floats.

There is everything and nothing.

The universe and all of the life, all of the living force, that it contains vibrates in and around and through him. He is neither alive nor not alive. He feels like he is being pressed and strangled and pulled apart all the same.

He can hear his mother's voice and feel her bright presence. It is calling to him, drawing him closer -- but he cannot make himself move toward or away.

He is everything and nothing. Weightless. The most dense thing in existence. Warm to the point of burning, evaporation. Utterly cold, totally frozen.

Suddenly, he has a body again and there is air rushing into his lungs so quickly he is _drowning_ in it. He needs to turn over, to cough, to force all of this heavy air out of his chest and his belly and he can't.

He's too weak. His limbs ache. His head. His eyes. Everything is too bright and clear and loud.

His mother holding his mouth open and telling him to swallow. He finds the energy to recoil from the bitter oil that flows across his tongue. She helps to heft his body over and his stomach convulses. She demands to know how much he ate, enduring the claws of his hands against her arms as he heaves.

He rasps his denial and he is a child again, terrified and ill.

Exhausted, he slumps back and sinks into the velvet stillness of unconsciousness. When he wakes again he does not have the energy to be mortified that he has been bathed. He is fresh and clean, no evidence of his struggles through the deadly nest of Atropa. The superficial abrasions on his skin have disappeared, though muscle-deep pain persists like ropes lashed around his limbs.

He sleeps and wakes in fits, moving only to chew the bean pods Leia offers, an antidote to the Atropa's effect. He thinks he's dreaming when he hears the single-plural voice fill the room and his head. He can feel a foreign presence, triple-triplicate vibration of Force that is distinctly flavored with darkness. It is as if they as standing over him, their heads bowed together watching him like an animal in a cage.

Ben comes back to himself slowly. Leia dotes, keeping close and gently pestering him about how he feels. The touch of her hands on his bare skin is like getting too close to the hearth or a bath that has been over-boiled. It's almost intolerable. Her proximity makes his flesh crawl, something beneath twisting in an angry recoil. He brushes the feeling aside as aftereffect of his trials and his own squeamishness at being poked and prodded like helpless child.

After days spent huddled and idle surrounded by tincture and potion and sacred objects in the room where he did the work that started this endless trial of his strength and patience, he demands with a weak, reedy voice to be freed.

He doesn't wait for permission. He gathers what little reserve of energy he's recouped under Leia's care and finds his feet. He gathers the well-worn quilt he's been nested in and wraps it around himself like a big cape.

Leia steers him toward the stairs to their living spaces tries to guide him into their common room. Ben shakes her off and continues upward. She protests, following on quick feet even as the living stairs convey him toward his room.

"Please, Ben," she pleads. "I don't think it's wise for you to be alone -- least of all in that room."

Ben halts near the door. He's forgotten the state that he left the place in -- overgrown and overrun with a strange strangle of vine and stalk and rotten fruit. His mouth works for a moment over words that he can't get out.

"Ben, please, come sit. We'll get you fed, some clean clothes. We need to talk about what -- "

He shakes his head and takes a step over the threshold. "No, mother. I need to rest. There's nothing to talk about."

As his toes touch the tangle of growth that carpets the floor, the sour brittleness of age and decay begins to lift. Fresh, green hue spreads from the little point of contact and continues as he steps fully inside.

"Ben you were gone for -- "

He dismisses her with a haughty wave of his hand and eases himself down into the bed, one of the few surfaces not consumed by flora. He feels her there, watching, the weight of her gaze like a stone between his shoulders. The glow of her presence in the fabric of things is smoldering and heavy. After a long moment, she finally turns and leaves him.

* * *

Ben speaks to an empty room. His gaze is distant and haunted. His face grows gaunt with exhaustion, thinning out and turning angular.

He takes meals with quiet gratitude and eats as if he hasn't in days.

The dense twist of flora grows greener and more lush. It bears fruit and flower at an alarming rate. It reaches over the threshold of his room and creeps tentatively out of the window frame.

Ben hardly leaves the bed. He examines his arms and legs with bleary eyes, feels the waning flesh of his torso, over and over again. Leia asks if he feels something and he cannot explain it.

The flora has a hostile mood when she enters. It wants her gone, fears her presence there. It's damned _fox grape_. The fruit is as sweet as confection. It's entirely docile in cultivation. Why it's here, why it's so _hostile_, why it seems to thrive as Ben languishes, is entirely beyond the scope of Leia's comprehension. The only thing she knows for certain is that it is tied to the terrible Emptiness that has infected her dominion -- her household -- her love.

"Ben, talk to me, please," she pleads. "What _is_ all of this?"

She sits on the edge of the bed beside him where he is sat straight up. His legs are crossed neatly at the ankle, stretched out long in front of him. He looks at her, breaking his blank stare out the window and turning toward her, when she lays her hand against his forearm.

"I can't make it stop if I don't understand what's going on. This -- all of this!" She gestures to the room around them and the invasive nest of fox grape. "There's something not right. Something... not light. Life."

Ben nods, his expression serious in agreement.

"It needs to go," she says, tone brokering nothing less than an ultimatum.

Ben frowns, bristling and pulling his arm away. "Why? Because you can't control it?"

Leia takes a breath and holds it for a moment. She can feel their tree-home tense with the force of her outrage. She is afraid for her child. She does not want it to manifest in unreasonable anger.

"This grew after you raised the lamb. We both know that there was something not right about it. There is something not right about this. It's... its _consuming_ you. Have you looked at yourself? Do you not feel weak? You're wasting -- "

Ben's expression turns bitter, brows narrowed and lips pursed. "I've never felt more awake. Perhaps, mother, it's _you_ who's weak. I thought, maybe, you were testing me. But, really... you couldn't do it. You didn't know how... didn't have the strength to try."

Leia stand and leaves before she says something she knows she'll regret. Something is wrong with Ben. It must be stopped.

Ben doesn't announce when he leaves again. He simply goes. Leia feels it, knows it. Their home-tree relaxes, as if it has been holding itself tense, shoulders hitched and gut tight. The air seems less heavy, less full of static, less like she is breathing underwater.

She is ashamed that she's relieved.

Ben is in trouble, she shouldn't feel this way.

The doves follow him, watch him. He may be unwell but he's safe and that is the best that she can ensure at the moment.

Leia stands alone in the room where their work is done, glaring at the sightless sockets of the lamb's skull where it sits on the shelf. She grabs it and the box it rests on top of, the remaining skeleton inside. She tucks the box beneath her arm and hauls it out to the roaring hearth.

An adult sheep has one hundred and ten bones. They clatter like summer hail onto the crackling wood. She holds the skull for a moment before tossing it onto the top of the pile. The flame swells, heat billowing from the brick cubby of the hearth. Outside, the breeze picks up. It licks down the chimney and draws the smoke up and away.

She wonders as she climbs the stairs with a blade older than herself in hand, if Ben will know what she is about to do -- if he'll feel it when she does this terrible task.

There isn't another way, she's sure of that. The things that came into their home that night need to be destroyed. It's the only plausible solution she can see. To fight off the unnatural void that has crept in at the edges of everything and settled heavily into the atmosphere of her home, she needs to actually _fight_.

She cannot will it away. It will not be driven off with Light because it is not Dark -- it is Nothing, an absence of tremendous proportion. To define it and destroy it makes sense. It can no longer be "Nothing" if it is "Something."

Leia hesitates outside of Ben's room. She squeezes the handle of her blade, feeling the reassuring weight of it in her hand, the generations of use and work and power in it. The glass blade is clear like the sky in the earliest Spring days. It's as strong as it is sharp.

The fox grape infestation doesn't feel the way the wisteria did. It feels vulnerable rather than overpowering. It's sleepy and glutted with energy, filling all of its nothingness. She begins her task at the doorway. To clear the threshold, she thinks, will be the best start. To forge a path. Find sureness of foot in the burgeoning chaos. She grips the closest vine and pulls it away from the wall with effort. She slips the blade behind it and begins to saw through the thick greenery.

Leia works for hours and hardly makes a dent.

Fruit and flower turn to mush beneath her feet, crushed in her hands. Young vines grab at her, twisting around her hands and into her clothes. Face and hands sticky with juice and sap and tears, she gathers the dry, husk-like vines that she has severed and makes her way to the ground.

In the pit of stone where the lush reclining space in her gardens once stood ready for warmth and light and joy, she heaps the strange foliage and sets it to flame.


End file.
